36 - Where can I find the different versions of letters in InDesign - Ligatures.

Have you ever seen some fonts, and you're like "How did they make it look so pretty?" You can see, that's the one we worked at in the last example. And these little extra fonts are called Ligatures. And a part of the font are hidden away. You can see this one here, like this Y, that's the default Y, but look at the varieties of Ys you get to pick from. Same with this ampersand, '&' here. All sorts of different versions to help you pick the one that's perfect for your situation. So let's go and do that, and look at something called Ligatures.

So Ligatures, although they're kind of different from Glyphs, they're actually found in the exact same place. Let's zoom in on 'Healing Herbs', and what we want to do is, we want to see if there's any kind of more special Hs. Say, this H is nice, but we want to fancy it up a little bit. So, with it selected, go to 'Type', 'Glyphs'. What will happen is, if you got a letter selected, you can see in here, it's giving you other options for that H. I'm going to make them a lot bigger so we can see.

This one here, you can see there's kind of three versions of it. So there's this version, then I click on this version, and you double click on it, you see it replaced it with a swishy fancy version. Do I like it more? What's the difference between these two? I can't see the difference. Hold down this one, there's only actually two options.

So we fancied up this one, maybe this S, is there anything for the S? You highlight them and hope for the best. This one here has a slightly different version. This one here, you can see a spiky version. Now there'll be some letters that are just more prone to having swishy extra bits. You can start to see down here, let's have a look.

I'm going to make a new text box, just for an example. So I'm going to type in Y, and a lower case y and you see, if I highlight y, it has this version, I'm just double clicking just to see, but you can see, y in this case, there are so many versions. It is lots of words, and it's got a nice shape to do these types of flourishes, and they're called Ligatures.

It's just, somebody designs the font, and then goes through, and goes "What about it if it was like this, and like this?" It allows you to do some extra bits and pieces. I find this quite useful. I don't know why, but ampersand is one of those letters that you end up using quite a lot. Ampersand is that, '&'. But you'll notice in here, there's some really cool ampersands. There's that one, there's that one. Double click it, there's that one, double click, that one there. They're the same font, but a very different look, and feels for them. So if you're doing an invite and—

I feel like I've done about a zillion wedding invites in my design career and it's always like, "Dan & Katie invite you to their wedding," and it's always the ampersand you spend the most time, doing a big ingredient for the design. If you look in here though, and let's say we pick a font that isn't as exciting, so I'm going to copy and paste this one. I'm going to go there, and I'm going to pick-- say your company uses 'Times New Roman', so I'm going to pick 'Times Regular'. 'Healing Herbs', I'm going to highlight the H. And, there's no Ligatures. So you might just find that-- especially with the free font, there's going to be no Ligatures, and if it's just a real plain font, they haven't gone through and done a swishy looking H.

All right, my friends, that is looking at Ligatures. I'm going to go through and tidy this up. You can skip on to the next one. So we need you, we need you, I don't really like the little wiggly bit there. Do I like it? I'm not sure. Let's go into the next video, anyway. I'll see you over there.